Suggested Viewing for Rural Manager

We realized that the important thing was not the film itself but that which the film provoked. —Fernando Solanas ("Cinema as Gun")

The purpose of nearly all films/ documentaries is to communicate. People want to communicate to an outside world with hidden portrayals and interpretations of society. There will be no solution but a simplistic view of this world through the eyes of cinema. What good is cinema if it trails behind literature? Just as in literature, as the taste has moved from fiction to nonfiction, this happens in the film as well. There is a need for an individual to engage with harder issues such as poverty, gender discrimination, sex trade, class struggle, prostitution, environmental damage, terrorism, ethnic and religious riots. We unknowingly or knowingly form opinions on them very fast. But such complex issues require the further probe to see the complete picture. A film or documentary is a naive effort to increase our knowledge base before making any judgment.

I am enlisting films and documentaries that show bewitching, haunting, anxious, and even comic portraits of our society's underground life. On one side the cinema displays the natural beauty of the society along with representing the related customs and cultures, the other side the hidden taboos and exploitative practices. What one wants to communicate and what one hopes to reach are two different sides of the same coin. I hope you will have a rational and emotional response to the section of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed experiences presented through a simple, straight-to-heart edition of cinema.

1- Movies on Business - Rocket Singh Salesman of Year, Trishul, Guru & Chak De India, Pursuit of Happiness, It’s a Wonderful Life, Thank You for Smoking, The Hudsucker Proxy, Death of a Salesman, Glengarry Glen Ross, Barbarians at the Gate, The Social Network, The Insider, The Godfather, Wall Street, 12 Angry Men, Up in the Air, Modern Times, Norma Rae, A Christmas Carol, Syriana.

2- Movies on Development - Manthan, Swades, Peepli Live, Well Done Abba, Do Bigha Zamin, Mother India, Aghaat, Gaabhricha Paus, Goshta Choti Dongraevadhi, Jhing Chik Jhing, Kanchivaram, Bawandar.

3- Good Documentaries - There's No Tomorrow; The Yes Men Fix the World; Inside Job; A Small Act; Smartest Guys in the Room; The Corporation; Food, Inc.; An Inconvenient Truth; India Untouched; Jai Bhim Comrade; Kiran Bedi: Yes Madam, Sir; Ram ke Nam; Pitr, Putr aur Dharmayuddha, Born Into Brothels; The Day My God Died; The Story of India; Final Solution; Love in India; The Slow Poisoning of India; A Narmada Diary; Satyamev Jayate(TV Series).

One may suffer from PDDD (Post Documentary Dullness Disorder). I hope you feel the films and documentaries because you will not enjoy them. These films have more roles other than eroticism and social duty. We are just given a tour of reality through them. Saying in the words of John Grierson- In the documentary, we deal with the actual, and in one sense with the real. But the really real, if I may use that phrase, is something deeper than that. The only reality which counts in the end is the interpretation that is profound.

Remember, all our lives, we have been asked to believe that "quality matters, not quantity". Yes, there is the absence of critical documentaries on the current phase of Indian society that reflect a big lapse in our higher education. Watch the films and grasp the reality of development either for people or fair market, one bite at a time - every film will tell something, you don't know ;)

Suggested Reading for Rural Manager

The philosophy of the former Nation editor Victor Navasky, “to question the conventional wisdom, to be suspicious of all orthodoxies, to provide a home for dissent and dissenters, and to be corny about it, to hold forth a vision of a better world” still holds true for times now.

We are all living in an era where raising comforts and growing economy has conditioned many individuals with good education to jerk off all political responsibilities and even basic understanding of political matters. There is rapid increase in the mindless content of entertainment, news, films and books, hence we have to seek knowledge in a very mature and intelligent manner. In the era of instant judgement, careful analysis and patience is required. By looking through the complexity enough one need to find real cause of sufferings of many.

Curiosity is the most powerful thing you own. There is a pleasure of finding things out. Starting point of any education is by giving us an understanding of our-self, our culture and our world. Our knowledge must adapt to changing times, not get buried under traditional walls of classroom teaching. I don't read journals (not even EPW) myself as even using Google smartly requires a scholarly work. But there is always an effort and guidance required for personal growth.

I am naming here few books related with the field of rural management and development. You can add your own preferences but reading books is a personal choice. There is a very thin line between creative suggestion and interference. One is always free to search and share his/her own knowledge. I will quote Aldous Huxley who put it in a more elegant way - “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

Good Management Books

01- Connect the dots by Rashmi Bansal
02- Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
03- The Essential Drucker by Peter Drucker
04- Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson
05- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
06- Simply Fly – A Deccan Odyssey by Captain Gopinath
07- Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson
08- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
09- Made In Japan: Akio Morita & Sony Reissue by Akio Morita
10- Positioning : The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries, Jack Trout
11- The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
12- What Money Can't Buy The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J. Sandel
13- We Are Like That Only: Understanding the Logic of Consumer India by Rama Bijapurkar
14- Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't by Jim Collins
15- Beyond the MBA Hype: A Guide to Understanding and Surviving B-Schools by Sameer Kamat
16- The Ascent Of Money : A Financial History Of The World : A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Good Development Books

01- I Have a Dream by Rashmi Bansal
02- Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich
03- I Too Had a Dream by Verghese Kurien
04- Small is Beautiful by E F Schumacher
05- Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen
06- Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
07- Everybody loves a Good Drought by P Sainath
08- The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture by Wendell Berry
09- We Are Poor but so Many: The Story of Self-employed Women in India by Ela R Bhatt
10- Hello Bastar: The Untold Story Of India's Maoist Movement (Paperback) by Rahul Pandita
11- Banker To The Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty by Muhammad Yunus
12- A Fistful of Rice: My Unexpected Quest to End Poverty Through Profitability by Vikram Akula
13- The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits by CK Prahalad
14- Poor Economics: Rethinking Poverty And The Ways To End It by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo
15- Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism by Muhammad Yunus

How much book a person can read, it can never substitute the experience part of the life. Talking with the people who are living with, not against, nature is biggest guide of a rural manager. Their wisdom and prejudices have been passed through generation of experiences. Observe them !!!

Grassroutes: Developing Villages through Rural Tourism

Inir Pinheiro is a MBA in Rural Management from XIMB of 2004 – 2006 batch. He skipped placement offers to start up his own company, Grassroutes. Grassroutes is based on the concept of responsible rural tourism wherein tourism is run, managed and owned by local village communities. Today, it is a sustainable and profit making venture transforming unknown small villages, near the metros, into viable tourist destinations; sustainable for him and giving livelihood opportunities to the villagers. There is enough Media Coverage of this rural tourism venture.



The best part in his story that he is a "typical city boy", born and brought up in Mumbai. Inir learnt about the realities of village India much later. Inir proves that one need not to belong to villages to work in rural areas. He described once his work in the words of Regina Spektor -

“It started out as a feeling,

Which then grew into a hope,

Which then turned into a quiet thought,

Which then turned into a quiet word

And then that word grew louder and louder…….

'Til it was a battle cry !”

You know you’re a Jhabierite when….

1. You checked your stu-mail/Notice Board more habitually than you breathed or blinked
2. You could login to AIS even in your sleep
3. You found it easier to sleep right under the prof’s nose than in your room
4. You slept through all of the CEO talks (read: mass sleep-athons) and couldnt care less if the speaker performed a blindfolded back-somersault while simultaneously balancing a marble on his nose
5. You perfected the art of nodding off while standing during a presentation
6. You had your stumail,gmail,AIS,printer,IM,twitter passwords at your fingertips but still somehow managed to forget your girlfriend’s birthday everytime
7. You were addressed as someone from ‘XLRI Bhubaneswar’ on your train journey back home & you resisted the urge to rip his tonsils right off
8. You sulked about the prettiest faces on campus always being in the other section, the senior batch or in a different programme altogether
9. You had more visitors to your room from the amphibian family than from MTR/RMH
10. You regard your MBA education not as an investment but as a ‘sunk cost’
11. You agree that a course such as COMA could not have been more aptly named
12. You cant remember the last time you had breakfast in the mess
13. Your basic food groups were: 1.Beer 2.Caffeine 3. Masala Thums-up 4. Maggi 5. Pizza 6. Some more beer
14. You felt like you were cheating on Country Kitchen on the rare days you had dinner in the mess
15. You flashed your college ID at a restaurant manager’s face seeking a discount but ended up having it shoved down your gullet instead
16. You knew that even if the world were to end, there would still always be X-Café & Walmart
17. You got away with saying ‘yes sir’, ‘present sir’, ‘yes sir’ back to back during attendance
18. You have actually seen GOD and even had HIM call out your name during attendance
19. You knew that a ‘Bring your laptops to class today’ notice actually meant ‘look buggers, I’m in no mood to teach today, so why don’t you just do your stuff & let me do mine’
20. The 4 P’s you live by stand for Pessimism, Procrastination, (Bi)Polarism & Plagiarism
21. Your business awareness levels paled in comparison to your blood-alcohol levels
22. You found a newspaper’s obituary section more interesting than the business page
23. You were more willing to swallow a sword laced with cobra poison and have your body crevices pierced with red hot iron rods rather than attend that last remaining lecture of the day
24. You envied the strays outside the main gate for having a better social life than you
25. You feel like killing a baby everytime you come across the word ‘Mandatory’
26. You acknowledge that the wheel is not the most important human invention, Google is
27. You couldn’t thank Xerox enough the night just before your exams
28. You can type 316 words a minute but struggle to read your own handwriting
29. You show how it’s possible to be illegible even on MS word & MS excel
30. You wasted your time partaking in compelling cinema such as Gunda, Chandaal & Jallaad on X-Sys when you could have done something worthwhile like harvesting dried kharbooja seeds or adopting a maroon monkey for your farm in FarmVille
31. You count Crazy Taxi, Bouncing Balls & Throw the mummy among your favourite sports, (and not X-cricket)
32. Facebook is not just a site for you, it’s a way of life
33. You went to the library to socialize (read: check out the cute chick ) or to have yourself clicked with books so that you could put them up on FB/Orkut for your parents to see & feel all reassured & happy
34. You said “Arre pata, usne apna marriage proposal CONVERT kar liya”
35. You know a HR professional when you see (and hear) one
36. 7 am lectures were a myth, and attending them, a crime
37. 5 pm was your idea of a perfect morning
38. You can peacefully sleep through earthquakes, meteorite showers, alien invasions & of course, JLT’s
39. Your next door neighbour (who lived within 30 cms of you) sent you an email asking you NOT to wake him up the following morning
40. You set your mobile phone alarm for the 9 am lecture, then reset it for the 2pm lecture, and then again reset it to 5pm for the snacks, and eventually went on to miss dinner
41. You didn’t remember what sunlight looked like, and often confused sunrises with sunsets (also males with females)
42. X-pressions was the only time you were active & that too because you got to check out the chicks from other colleges & then tut-tut about how rotten your luck was
43. Terms such as ‘pataka, hot chick, garma garam item’ inadvertently brings to mind the image of a girl perspiring & burning in the Bhubaneswar heat
44. You abused the term ‘it depends’ to such proportions that Oxford just stopped short of filing a case of harassment against the institute
45. You called upon X-Sys to complain that you were unable to access Facebook, only to realize that typing www.facebook.com in notepad gets you nowhere
46. The dosa they served in the mess was the worst dosa in the world but you still got up every Sunday morning at 9 am to line up in the queue
47. You thought breaking into Fort Knox was a cakewalk compared to MTR
48. You took a bath everytime there was a solar eclipse
49. The last time you did your laundry, Halley’s Comet had made an appearance
50. Almost all your t-shirts are from X-pressions, Alumni or game/interest committees
51. The only time you had given your superhero costume (read: business suit) for drycleaning was before you got here
52. Your saw your entire life flash before your eyes as soon you were handed your valuation end-term question paper
53. You needed SPSS to convince you that your bakar time is inversely related to your QPI
54. There was nothing surprising about Surprise quizzes anymore
55. You mulled over taking the CFA exam without even knowing what CFA stood for
56. You took up the ‘fight against deadlines’ cause with pretty much the same zeal with which Bollywood stars take up the ‘fight against Polio’ cause
57. You used font size 32 for your assignments as a desperate ruse to get to the minimum 10 page limit
58. You used font size=Amoeba??? for your last minute scribblings on your exam paper
59. You resorted to the good old ‘Cntrl C-Cntrl V’ for your Business Ethics term paper titled “Plagiarism- a social malady”
60. You finished two whole seasons of LOST/FRIENDS in 2 days flat just before your end terms kicked in and then proceeded to finish three more seasons while they were on
61. You promised yourself you’d start preparing for placements tomorrow, but that tomorrow somehow never arrived
62. CQPI was just another four letter word
63. You can quote dialogues from any of IMDB’s top 250 movies
64. Conniving with your friends during exams is what you called Group Dynamics, not cheating
65. You could quote Kotler at the drop of a hat but couldn’t remember your postal address
66. You attended batchmeets religiously but never bothered to turn up at Alumni talks
67. You often discussed Pizza Hut’s core competency/product differentiation vis-à-vis Smokin’ Joe’s
68. You subconsciously started addressing your elder brother as ‘bhaina’
69. You tell your dad you’re taking the dog out for a X-walk
70. You start writing executive summaries for your tweets, SMSes, status messages..everything
71. You can prepare a 40 page dossier replete with all the MBA jargons in the book to arrive at the conclusion that inanimate objects do not need air/oxygen to survive and are therefore non-living
72. You can beat any Tom, Dick, Harry, Yadav, Patel, Sharma, Singh, Khan, Thirunakarasumaiyalamma at the fine art of pfaffing
73. You refrain from using the word ‘bhakti’ in spiritually stimulated discussions & at family pujas
74. You gave Maxinations more consideration than your sister’s wedding
75. You have the attention span of an armless monkey with a major flea problem
76. You would happily give your right arm away for a JLT
77. You get turned on everytime you see a chain mail
78. You dont find prison jokes funny anymore
79. Masochism has become as much a part of your social fabric as say human sacrifice to the Aztec culture
80. Messrs. Levin & Rubin seemed as grotesque manifestations of Jack the Ripper & Hannibal Lecter
81. You swore that had Gandhi studied here, he would have killed more Jews than Hitler
82. The admin & acads screwed you so bad you contemplated taking a pregnancy test
83. You likened Gladi, Kuruk, Skill & Helios to Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba & Harkat-ul-Mujahideen respectively
84. You equated balancing your acads, responsibilities & personal life to a tightrope walk on a cord made from burning charcoal while balancing a family member on the head and at the same time have Sunny & Bobby Deol dancing to Kajraare on either ends of the rope
85. You were socked in the face with the realization that 90 mins was actually 5400 seconds of raw, unmitigated torture eventually leading to death
86. You believe in reincarnations (having died multiple deaths yourself during the course of a single lecture)
87. S.O.B means more than just a slur to you
88. Khajoor isn’t exactly your favourite fruit
89. You sniggered everytime you heard one of those CEOs or recruiters say “you are the crème-de-la-crème..the top 1%..the future leaders of the country..blah blah”
90. You crack up everytime you hear the words ‘MBA’ & ‘value-add’ in the same sentence
91. During placement week, the only company you cared about was ‘female company’
92. During Convocation, you realized you had forgotten almost everything you had learnt at school, were left with the engineering skills of a brick & only had this degree to show for your efforts
93. You realize that the only thing more difficult than getting into XIMB is getting out of XIMB

*The End and Flush*

-------Adapted from the blog post of Soorma Bhokali.

"Young Professional" @ Odisha Livelihood Mission

"No man is a fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." - Jim Elliot

I personally identify and like to attach with the cause of the underdogs in general. There is a dilemma involved with this choice because by descent, upbringing, education and needs; I am a person belonging to middle class society. I am fond of middle−class comforts (like 3rd AC train compartments),a bit of liberal values and even risk free career aspirations. And now, I have undertaken a job in the OLM (Odisha Livelihood Mission) as a "young professional" (a word designated by World Bank for their fresh joiner) so that my work can directly have a positive impact on the people. I had made a new path in the career by abandoning engineering to work in the rural areas for a brief time. The line that boosted my career jump was- If gamblers start worrying about the odds, they would never gamble.

Our generation has an old mindset of scarcity (money) and risk aversion (career switch). Age is never an issue if you have an enthusiastic spirit. 27 is such an age where I stand on the end of bachelor life chasing wild dreams. I have chosen to change course radically and to start completely all over again from scratch. I am happy that my new job will not be to make people buy things they don't want and don't need.

There was a bit of randomness in allotting work initially but induction training happened at Bhubaneswar office. New joiners will be sent to rural areas for exposure to the organization work style through the trainee-ship segment. I am going to Balasore district for immersion visit of 21 days accompanies with two other new fellows like me. Field experience is not only about preservation as about fortification of the knowledge gained at college.

People travel to the far and remote part of alienated regions. They are just only "guided tourists", who return from turbulent societies only to talk about wonderful scenery and wildlife, instead of the people who live their daily lives in the pain and laughter in those foreign lands. Identity of the people leaving in such a desolated region cannot be reduced to a mere geographical space. It is much more than that: it comprises of the emotional−psychological and historical landscapes. I am not any morally superior or far better than them but only going one level more from being a "development tourist" only this time.

Going off the topic, i am too happy to support and share vision of Jairam Ramesh who publicly proclaimed - Unlearn the garbage taught in professional schools.